Tomahawk Health Services

To pair with its strong overall score, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for inspections. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report, which is still very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. There are a number of datapoints within this grade. Most of these criteria relate to levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving a resident more often.

This nursing home is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it was given a grade of B+. It outpaced most nursing homes in this area. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Switching gears to our next category, this facility also performed well in the short-term care category. We awarded it a B+ for this category. This finalized a first-rate report card. Our short-term care scores are probably more critical for residents in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.